2 - Semantics

What is Computational Semantics?

A field within NLP focused on mapping what a user says into representations that capture meaning and can be understood and processed by computers.

What is a Symbolic Representation of language?

A human-interpretable representation of meaning composed of symbols representing objects, properties, or relations rather than continuous vectors.

What are three primary formalisms used for symbolic meaning representations?

Logical forms (e.g., First Order Logic), Frames (slot-filler structures), and Graphs (e.g., Abstract Meaning Representation).

What is a Frame-based meaning representation?

A structure composed of an Action/Intent type (the goal) and a set of Slots (attribute-value pairs) capturing relevant parameters of a statement.

What is Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR)?

A rooted, directed, edge-labeled graph representation where nodes are variables/concepts and edges represent semantic relations.

What is the Principle of Compositional Semantics?

The principle that the meaning of a complex expression is built recursively from the meanings of its subcomponents according to its syntactic structure.

How can Semantic Parsing be framed as a Sequence Prediction task?

By assigning sequence tags (such as BIO format) to input words to identify semantic slots, domains, and intent categories.

What is BIO Tagging in sequence labeling?

A scheme where B marks the Beginning of a chunk, I marks tokens Inside the chunk, and O marks tokens Outside.

What is the difference between Hyponymy and Hypernymy?

A Hyponym is a more specific term (e.g., dog), while a Hypernym is a more general superordinate term (e.g., animal). Dog is a hyponym of animal, and vice-versa but with hypernym

What is Meronymy?

A part-whole relationship where a term represents a part of a larger concept (e.g., wheel is a meronym of car).

What is the difference between Homonymy and Polysemy?

Homonyms are words sharing spelling/sound with completely unrelated meanings, while Polysemic words have multiple related meanings originating from the same root

What is WordNet?

A large lexical database for English where words are organized into sets of cognitive synonyms called "synsets".

What is PropBank?

A corpus adding predicate-argument structures (such as ARG0 for agent and ARG1 for patient) directly to syntactic parse trees.

What is FrameNet?

A lexical database based on Frame Semantics that defines word meanings through the underlying event or situation frame and its associated frame elements.